I simply took issue with Cory “defining” experience as “something that happens to the brain”. That is the essence of materialist reductionism: the belief that the brain is the fundamental reality, and the experience is a secondary phenomenon.

I don’t take issue with the fact that many correlations between neurological phenomena and mental states have been observed. My point is that mental experience is primary reality, from an experiential point of view.

I can accept scientific materialism as a very useful model for explaining how various things work. However, I regard it, like other models, as provisional and limited, rather than absolutely true in a way that “trumps” everything else.

There are other models (which may include things that you might define as “non-observable”, which I might rephrase as “not observed by you”) that can also be useful in some circumstances.

Second: the German Idealists. the “thing-in-itself” is certainly different from your experience of the thing. Your car is that thing in your garage that looks, feels, etc, a certain way – probably the way you perceive it. But it’s not only that. You’ve only got a certain number of senses, and even they are extremely limited. You can’t see what your car looks like in infrared, for example, or hear what it sounds like at frequencies below 20 hz/s. You couldn’t even hope to perceive what it looks like in ten-dimensional space. Your phenomenal experience of it is only a tiny tiny piece of its actual reality, filtered imperfectly through your very few senses, with their very limited ability to perceive information about the world. The thing-in-itself is the totality of the reality of an object. You don’t have to say that this means there are two cars in your garage, one you can perceive and one that you can’t, but it’s not that much less true to say that the overwhelming majority of the one car you’ve got in there IS utterly imperceptible. That’s your noumenal car.

Well, no it’s not incoherent to me. As I understand it, it’s simply to distinguish what you think/feel/perceive is going on vs what is going on. Usually, there’s a pretty good fit between the phenomena and the noumena.

Off the top of my head, the closest example I can come up with is:
Phenomena: the sun rises in the East, over there, across the street over my neighbours’ houses and it sets in the West just North of the old folks’ home – this is what seems to be happening, this is my spatio-temporal sensual experience.
Noumena: the Earth rotates, exposing your patch of the planet to the Sun and after a while the rotation brings it into the shadow – this is the thing as it actually is.

But my enjoyment of the video contains no ontological contradictions or incoherence with regards to the “real” gummi bear that died to amuse me.

No, you didn’t. You contradicted it, then asked a question so someone else could explain the answer to you. You did not, in fact, argue anything.

To answer your question about your car, consider it in terms of what you can sense and what you cannot sense. You could, if you wished, see, hear, smell, touch, and taste your car. These are the only methods by which you can apprehend its existence. Thus, it only exists because you can physically sense it. You experience the phenomenon of its existence through your senses.

Take away a sense. Say, sight. The car still exists for you via the remaining for senses. But just because you lost your sight doesn’t mean it is no longer visible in the sense that it is physically present and capable of reflecting light. Now remove the remaining senses, and the conclusion is the same. You can no longer experience it at all. Does the car cease to exist? Or does it continue to existence in a noumenal realm to which you no longer have access.

Take it one step further. You never had those five senses, so you never had the ability to apprehend the existence of the car. If we accept as a given that things exist in themselves (do not rely on an observer to exist), then your car now has both phenomenal and noumenal existence.

It is not, in fact, incoherent. Unless, of course, you’re a strict solipsist and claim that if you cannot make sense of it, then there is no sense to made of it at all.

In any case: Dennett doesn’t believe there are such things as zombies. To quote:
We are all susceptible to the Zombic Hunch, but if we are to credit it, we need a good argument, since the case has been made that it is a persistent cognitive illusion and nothing more. I have found no good arguments, and plenty of bad ones.
(The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition? – 1999)

..

I thought of qualia and phenomena as interchangeable terms, but it’s obvious now that I was wrong. I’ll have to do some reading…

You’re taking that as axiomatic, but it’s far from it. There’s absolutely no reason – or evidence – to assume that we have some privileged position with regard to accurately apprehending reality.

Question on behalf of a friend: “Every time I’ve tried meditating, I’ve just fallen asleep. I don’t think that’s the point of the exercise. What am I doing wrong?”

Not getting adequate sleep. Eating too many carbs a couple of hours before meditating. Trying to meditate in bed at 10PM, or in the late afternoon or right after work. If you’re falling asleep, you’re probably tired, hypoglycemic, dehydrated, sick, medicated, etc.

My understanding (from the Mindfulness classes I took to combat 5yrs debilitating depression in Oxford UK)is that meditation allows us a chance to observe our needs – whether emotional, spiritual, or physical. The mistake is to think that there is a right and a wrong way/right or wrong things you are trying to achieve. We punish ourselves all the time with thoughts about how we haven’t done this/that/the other the way it should be – mostly without even realising it. Just relax, see what comes, and then think about what you’ve observed in a non-crytical manner. So in this case:
I meditated.
I feel asleep.
I was cross with myself for falling asleep.
That’s interesting, because being cross doesn’t achieve much.
What good can I make from this?
I can use this to go to sleep at night
Perhaps it means I need more sleep than I’m getting?

I tried several classes of mindful meditation, and they all focus on following your breathing

I can’t do that. I get an anxiety attack. I can’t stop thinking about my breathing, that I’ll stop breathing. Breathing is supposed to be something you don’t think about, you just do. If I focus on it, I become anxious.

If you tell me that something is both red and green all over and I reply that that’s incoherent I have indeed given a valid argument in response. Saying that things can be both perceivable and absolutely imperceivable is plain contradiction. Even so I was polite and asked if someone could explain how this can be. Could you explain it to me?

“You could, if you wished, see, hear, smell, touch, and taste your car.”

No I can’t. According to Kant I can *never* perceive the thing-in-itself in principle. The car in my garage isn’t the “real” car, only it’s phenomenal aspect which is an illusion. The real or noumenal car in-itself can never be perceived by me or anyone by any means whatsoever. There is a reason Kant is called an Idealist.

“You can no longer experience it at all. Does the car cease to exist? Or does it continue to existence in a noumenal realm to which you no longer have access.”

You misunderstand Kant. The noumenal isn’t a tree in a forest that no one heard but could hear if only they were present. The noumenal tree can never be heard at all, ever. Only the phenomenal tree can be heard or potentially heard to fall. It takes a powerful load of philosopzin’ BS to convince people of that gibberish.

“If we accept as a given that things exist in themselves (do not rely on an observer to exist), then your car now has both phenomenal and noumenal existence.”

I don’t know what it means for a thing to exist in itself. I agree that things exist when we are not there to perceive them but I don’t agree that we need to invent a ghostly noumenal realm to account for the objective independent existence of my car in my garage.

“It is not, in fact, incoherent.”

You keep saying that. Repetition doesn’t make your argument correct. Saying that things are both perceptible and imperceptible is a flat contradiction and by all accounts…. incoherent. You really need to respond to that.

“Unless, of course, you’re a strict solipsist and claim that if you cannot make sense of it, then there is no sense to made of it at all.”

I am a naive realist. I think that when I look at my car I am seeing my car and not the phenomenal projection of an imperceptible noumenal car.

Actually, I claim that it is “only that”. If there is some part of my car that cannot be perceived then it doesn’t exist.

“You can’t see what your car looks like in infrared”

Yes I can.

“or hear what it sounds like at frequencies below 20 hz/s.”

Yes I can.

“Your phenomenal experience of it is only a tiny tiny piece of its actual reality”

Nonsense. Since phenomenal just means experience how can there be an experience that cannot be experienced?

“the overwhelming majority of the one car you’ve got in there IS utterly imperceptible. That’s your noumenal car.”

Nonsense on stilts. Every bit of my car is perceptible. I can take it apart, cut it up and inspect every single bit of it. I can determine the placement and composition of every single atom that makes up my car. Nowhere will I find this noumenal car you speak of. Where is it? How would I know when I come across it? Is my noumenal car blue and leaks oil like my phenomenal car?

I believe you are deeply confused. I’d like to sell you my noumenal car. I’ll accept 20 grand for it. Deal?

Anybody who can understand pointers in C should be able to understand your explanation with small effort.

Thus, there is an unavoidable ontological and epistemological gap between reality as we construct it out of the otherwise-meaningless babble of raw sense impressions, and reality as it is in itself absent the conceptual schema that is imposed on it as a prior condition of human knowledge. The former is the domain of phenomena, literally ‘things-showing-themselves’ (Anc. Greek nom. mid/pas part. of phano^, ‘to show’ or ‘appear’), and the latter is the domain of noumena, which is a little more difficult to translate, but ‘things being apprehended in thought’ is close enough. So-called because while, by definition, we can have no descriptive knowledge of noumenal reality, we still conceive of and recognize the category as a logical necessity, as Descartes does when he considers the limits of his certainty about the world outside his mind.

Of course, then Fichte came along and pointed out the untenable dualism in Kant’s thought and reworked the whole system, but that’s another story.

Of course, undoubtedly lots of people are going to read this as reaching the former conclusion anyway.

That’s pretty much the reductionist-materialist definition of experience… in which a mental model of the world is presumed to be more fundamentally “real” than the mind which contains the model.

My definition of experience is “something that I experience.”

To attempt to clarify – I think It’s important to be able to truly open your senses sometimes, and be capable of operating your mind without always having to resort to the convenient short-cuts judgements, labels, and words usually provide.

When your definition doesn’t provide any more meaning than the original word, it’s not really a definition.

Yes I am. To exist is have the potential to be perceived. To say that a thing can exist which can never interact with any other thing is like saying you can have an inside without an outside.

“There’s a car in the garage. It is what it is. There’s another one in your mind…”

Minds and mind stuff do not exist. What exists are brains, not minds and I am quite certain there is no automobile in my brain.

“There’s another one in your mind… that you “know” and have seen, felt, touched.”

This is called the homunculus fallacy. There is not a little man in my head who sees, touches and feels the little cars in my head.

“Isn’t it the same car? No. Apparently it is now 3 cars.”

The words we use to represent a thing are not the thing. There is only one car in my garage but there are multiple descriptions of it.

No it isn’t. The world consists entirely of mindless meaningless particles moving in lines of force. That’s all there is. How could there be anything else? How could there be something which can never be sensed at all under any possible conditions? Perception is one particle slamming into another one and having an effect. How could something which could never interact *in principle* with any other thing in the entire universe? If it exists it takes up space and if it takes up space then something else can bump into it and *that* is perception.

This sounds pretty damn materialist and Cartesian to me.

@DSMVWL THS – I agree with bjohndick that a definition which doesn’t tell you anything is not really a definition.

Evidence is piling up that for any given mental state there is a corresponding physical process in the brain. Equally mental states – including experiences like ‘will’ or ‘out of body perspective – can be had by stimulating the brain directly. Likewise for any given pin-point brain injury there is a corresponding deficit – whether cognitive, perceptual or motor being determined by the location. The conclusion that consciousness is entirely explained by activity of the brain is not reductionist in the sense you mean it. It is simply the most concise way of describing what is observed without inventing invisible and undetectable entities. Inventing non-observable, supernatural entities to explain consciousness is no more valid, and does not advance knowledge but stifles investigation and progress – as it does in the Catholic Church.

“Materialism” has become a favourite pejorative amongst people with supernatural beliefs. Because a so-called materialist (and I think there are very few actual materialists around) asks for evidence they are seen as shallow and somehow lacking in imagination. But if imagination is essential the criteria then all science fiction is science fact. However even the most ardent super-naturalists tend to make the distinction between fact and fiction at some point – most of us can distinguish between the imagined and the real, because as Philip K. Dick said “reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away”.

All this empirical evidence is both good news and bad for Buddhists. On one hand we can be slightly smug to have a 2500 year head-start on the rest of the world. We’ve known for this long that meditation creates positive change in people. We’ve known that mindfulness makes life more wonderful and beautiful. It’s great to see empirical evidence for it emerging, but we were already confident in our methods.

On the other hand the success of these studies also undermines cherished supernatural beliefs like “rebirth” (aka reincarnation – the theory that some aspect of our consciousness survives physical death). The brain studies make it quite obvious that an after-life is extremely unlikely. Which is rather a spanner in the works! Our anti-materialist world-view with its various supernatural features is crumbling and leaving behind a number of myopic fundamentalists, some disenfranchised idealists, and some radicalists who want to drop the traditional supernatural stuff (and are suspicious of standard Western Buddhism expressed in terms of German Idealism, English Romanticism or Protestantism) but retain the label Buddhist because we still employ methods like mindfulness and meditation.

When your definition doesn’t provide any more meaning than the original word, it’s not really a definition.

Reducing phenomenal states down to “something happens in the brain that means its real” tells you almost less than nothing.